UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons
Linzhan Mou, Jiahui Lei, Zhiyang Dou, Chenyue Cai, Chaoyue Song, Adam Finkelstein, et al.
arXiv:2609.05415v1Animating a character or creature from a 3D model sounds simple, until you realize every skeleton is different. Most animation systems are built for one body plan at a time, so they struggle when the asset is a bird, a snake, a robot, or anything unusual. UniMate tackles that problem with a single foundation model that can generate motion for arbitrary skeletons from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, without retraining for each new shape. The key idea is to make the model topology-aware: it encodes how joints are connected, how far they are along the body, and the overall structure of the skeleton directly inside the transformer. The authors also built a large motion dataset spanning many species and articulated objects. Why it matters is broad flexibility: the same model can do zero-shot transfer across body types, fill in missing motion, expand a sequence, or edit motion from text, which is a big step toward general-purpose animation tools.
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